Who Moved My Customers?

To say that marketing has changed in the last few years would be to put it quite mildly.

 

Marketing has been rocked, shaken, stirred, knocked for a loop and turned completely upside down not just by the Internet, but by the emergence of social media as an informational, educational and conversational platform leveraged by the masses.

 

The authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto had it right when they said, among other things, that…

“There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.”

The cold, hard facts say that customers are simply not where they were as recently as the turn of this century…they’re not waiting for the mail, reading the newspaper, listening to the radio or watching TV. At least not very often.

 

Instead, like you and me, they’re surfing the web, publishing their own blogs, following others on Twitter, telling stories on Facebook, building reputations on LinkedIn, sharing pictures on Flickr and putting videos on YouTube.

 

Yes, if you’re a marketer like me, you know that your customers have moved like the cheese (a metaphor for something you desire) in the classic, best-selling book written in 1998 by Spencer Johnson, M.D., Who Moved My Cheese? – and you had better see the inevitable…

 

…you had better read the proverbial “Handwriting on the Wall.”

 

Your customers have moved (in more ways than one) and it’s up to you to find them, listen to them, converse with them and serve them.

 

Don’t “Hem” or “Haw” or you might get left behind. Move with the cheese. “Sniff” out the changes that are taking place in your field and “Scurry” into a position from which you can take full advantage now before it’s too late.

 

Note: “Hem,” “Haw,” “Sniff” and “Scurry” are characters in the book, Who Moved My Cheese? (written by Spencer Johnson, M.D.) To learn more about the book, click here.

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